RISING CURRENTS: LOOKING BACK AND NEXT STEPS

MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City's harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

Related Events

Rising Currents Open Studios

This is the first opportunity for the public to visit the Rising Currents architect-in-residence studios at P.S.1. As part of P.S.1’s Saturday Sessions, the five teams will open their studios to the public and be available to discuss their work. Two rounds of presentations will be given. The first round of presentations will begin at 2:15 p.m. and the second will begin at 4:30 p.m.

Organized by The Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with P.S.1, Rising Currents will include a residency for teams of architects and designers at P.S.1 this fall and an exhibition at MoMA next spring. The residency at P.S.1 is part of Free Space, a new project with artists and nonprofit arts institutions in which P.S.1 provides collaborative use of its gallery space for events, rehearsals, and other live presentations.

The Ammann Singstad Lecture on Infrastructure honors the memory of the two great civil engineers who shaped the bridges and tunnels of New York in the middle of the twentieth century—Othmar Ammann (1879–1965) and Ole Singstad (1882–1969)—by inviting the most distinguished civil engineers in the world to speak about their own work and its greater impact. The lectures highlight the aesthetic and social dimensions of large civil and landscape engineering works and their repercussions on the physical, social, and political environment. Norwegian civil engineer Tor Ole Olsen will speak on infrastructure in the marine environment with an emphasis on his work with concrete structures in oil and gas, bridges, and renewable energy sources. This program is sponsored by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General and presented as part of the public programming associated with the upcoming MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. This lecture has been scheduled in conjunction with the Detour exhibition at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

The Promise of an Island: The Plan for Governors Island’s Park and Public Space

In conjunction with the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, presents a lecture titled “The Promise of an Island: The Plan for Governors Island’s Park and Public Space.”

Rising Currents Boat Tour

The Center for Architecture and The Museum of Modern Art invite you to on a guided boat tour of the five sites included in MoMA’s exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. Representatives from the five architects-in-residence teams will give overviews of each site, explaining how the solutions on view in the exhibition present new ways to occupy the harbor with adaptive “soft” infrastructures.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

Modern Poets: Rising Currents

The MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront addresses some of the most urgent challenges of sea-level rise resulting from global climate change in New York City. It features five inter-disciplinary teams that have proposed solutions to rising currents at five different sites along the New York and New Jersey coastlines. On a cruise aboard the New York Water Taxi around these sites, poets Matthea Harvey, Lisa Jarnot, and others read works about water, nature, and ecology, as well as newly commissioned poems that reimagine what the city might be like underwater, way above water, and with man-made islands and habitable piers. Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and organizer of the exhibition, introduces the program.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront

Rising Currents Boat Tour

The MoMA exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront addresses some of the most urgent challenges of sea-level rise in New York City resulting from global climate change. It features five inter-disciplinary teams that have proposed solutions to rising currents at five different sites along the New York and New Jersey coastlines. On a cruise aboard the New York Water Taxi around these sites, representatives from the architects-in-residence teams and Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design and organizer of the exhibition, will give overviews of each site, explaining how the solutions on view in the exhibition present new ways to occupy the harbor with adaptive “soft” infrastructures. Barry Bergdoll also introduces the program.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront

Rising Currents: A Panel Discussion on Next Steps

What is the afterlife of the exhibition Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront? City planners, architects, and an engineer join us to discuss their reactions to the exhibition, possible next steps, and wider implications at the metropolitan, national, and the global levels. The discussion is moderated by Barry Bergdoll, curator of the exhibition, and includes panelists Amanda Burden, Chair of the New York City Planning Commission and Director of the Department of City Planning; Guy Nordenson, Professor of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Princeton University, a Faculty Associate of the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and author of the study On the Water; Anuradha Mathur, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and a principle at Mathur/da Cunha; and Dilip da Cunha, visiting faculty at Parsons School of Design, New York, and a principle at Mathur/da Cunha.

Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront

Posted by
Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design

TheRising Currentsexhibition at MoMA closed on October 11, and as we have worked on the de-installation of the show in the intervening weeks, I have had a chance to reflect on the exhibition and the project as a whole. As I’ve noted here previously, the workshop and exhibition were precedent-setting in many ways—for myself as a curator, for MoMA as an institution, and, in some ways, for the New York architecture and landscape design community.

Unlike many exhibitions where the show itself is the end destination and ultimate distillation of researched concepts, the Rising Currents exhibition was always intended to be the “second act” in a three-part production, as it were. We wanted the exhibition to jump-start a dialogue on the urgency of climate change and rising sea levels among public officials, policy-makers, and the general public. Possible “third acts” could be to have some of the solutions proposed by the architects in the exhibition actually implemented, or to replicate the Rising Currents workshop and exhibition model in other locales that face similar challenges with sea level rise. In my recent article, “The Activist Exhibition: In the Wake of Rising Currents,” published in Log 20 (a print journal for writing and criticism on architecture), I expand further on how Rising Currents embodies the theme of Log 20: “curating as advocacy.”

It has been interesting to note that even though the exhibition is over, I continue to get research inquiries and requests for speaking engagements on the show from a wide range of people and organizations both here in the U.S. and abroad. I am actually delivering a talk next month on the exhibition at The Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Architecture, Design, Urban Planning and Advanced Tourism in Tenerife, one of the islands in the seven Canary Islands, Spain. The diversity of these requests and the continued interest in the topic indicates to me that the exhibition was successful in catalyzing debate, raising the awareness of the issues of climate change and rising sea levels, and, perhaps most importantly, elevating the role of design in tackling issues of climate change.

We held a closing panel discussion here at MoMA one week before the exhibition ended. The presentations and discussion focused on reactions to the exhibition and possible next steps. We recorded the discussion and wanted to share it here for those that couldn’t attend the event.

I’d like to thank everyone that followed the exhibition’s progress here on the blog and added their reflections in online comments. I hope the dialogue continues.

Comments

Hello. I am proposing to travel to NYC sometime later this year, and to meet with various people who are dealing with the problem of how highly urban waterfronts can deal with sea level rise. It is a shame I missed the Rising Currents exhibition but maybe I can still have the oportunity to talk to someone at MoMA about it.

So if you could consider this request and let me know who I might be able to contact via email, it would be greatly appreciated.

I am a senior manager (and town planner) with the Department of Planning and Infrastructure here in Sydney, Australia.

HI I am a third year Fine Arts degree student at the University of Tasmania. My major is painting and I am working on a body of work about Coastal Erosion. I live on an island—Tasmania and this is a growing problem. It has been interesting reading about the Rising Currents exhibition—wish I could have seen it!!
Cheers Suzanne Banks Tasmania

As a hydrologist and civil engineer I am glad to see a
practical exhibit and discussion after the surge that hit
New York City. Scientists, architects as a team can propose solutions, politicians will argue as to monies to pay for the project, but it is the local citizens of New York that should input their vision for Lower Manhattan.
Luckily you have Manhattan schist underlying the city.

The exhibit sounds wonderful. We have drought conditions in Phoenix that began in 1995. Everyone’s environmnent is changing on the planet. New York is now the pathfinder to lead other cities into the future.
I grew up in NYC in the late 1950s so I want to see New York succeed in the forefront of coastal planning.

I too wish I could have seen the exhibit. I was lucky enough to see a presentation about it in Seattle at a Univ of Washington \”Next City\” conference. As a climate activist, I urge you to curate a post-Sandy follow-up. \”Rising Currents\” was just the beginning of a very long conversation that needs to be had.

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